Frida

Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

For the past five years, Michael Bierut has taught a class for aspiring designers where students have to record the results of "a design operation that [they] are capable of repeating every day" for 100 straight days. Here are some of the results.

Zak Klauck: "Over the course of 100 days, I made a poster each day in one minute. The posters were based on one word or short phrase collected from 100 different people. Anyone and everyone was invited to contribute." The perfect exercise for a graphic designer.

Sunday, February 20, 2011

Dinner With My Family is taking a one week hiatus due to a cavalcade of visiting family and an inability to get good pictures of a meal. Tune in next week for the series' return.

On Monday, Sarah gave me a wonderful Valentine's Day gift – a Kindle. I've had a great deal of fun playing with it all week long.

Unsurprisingly, within a day of having the Kindle, I found myself spending lots of time online looking for great free resources for the Kindle. What books and other materials are out there for free for Kindle users?

Since I've received many emails over the years from Kindle users – and I know at least some people subscribe to The Simple Dollar using a Kindle – I thought I'd share some of the best resources I've found, both this week and over the years.

If you don't have a Kindle but think you might own one someday, bookmark this page.

Feedbookshttp://www.feedbooks.com/Good for a smattering of free current novels and many well-known public domain classics
Feedbooks is a source for purchasing electronic copies of books readable on the Kindle, but the site also offers a huge selection of free works, including quite a few well-executed copies of public domain literature. Generally, what you'll find here are very good versions of the more well-known classics, whereas Gutenberg (below) has a much wider selection but some of the less-well-known items can sometimes have minor issues (extra punctuation and so on). I particularly enjoy the new free releases section, where unknown authors give away a novel or two in order to try to make a name for themselves; you can find all kinds of things in there!

Project Gutenberghttp://www.gutenberg.org/Good for classic literature as far as the eye can see
Project Gutenberg is a repository for electronic copies of any and all public domain books. The advantage of this is that if you're looking for a piece of classic literature – and pretty much everything prior to 1920 is public domain – you'll find it here. The disadvantage is that the database is huge – you can wander for days through the mountains of books listed there. Another minor concern is that some of the lesser-known titles can have dodgy elements in their text, including some unwanted punctuation. However, if you enjoy reading classic literature, this is a definite place to go.

Amazon's Free Kindle Storehttp://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/digital-text/A deep mixed bag of free books
Amazon themselves has a free Kindle store which usually contains books that are available for free for a short time as a promotion from the book's publisher (my own book had this kind of promotion in the middle of last year and hit #1 on the "free" chart). There's a big mixed bag of books on there, but I found a couple interesting reads just this week – although they seem to no longer be free, just that quickly. Thus, it's difficult to link to a list of free picks for this store.

Other Sources?
After investigating a lot of additional Kindle resources, I found that most of them fell into one of three categories.

One, they were full of junk. By junk, I mean that a significant portion of the books were unreadable on a Kindle, either due to language problems or software errors or something else. Many of them seemed to be just scrapings of websites, resulting in piles of badly-formatted text.

Two, they were duplicates of Project Gutenberg. I found several sites that seemed to just duplicate what Project Gutenberg was doing, often just collecting piles of Gutenberg books that they themselves liked.

Three, they were full of pirated books. I found a few repositories of pirated books during my search, but I know quite well the work that goes into writing a book and I'll leave it up to the authors whether or not they want an electronic free copy floating around out there, not the pirates.

Of course, with the three resources above, you'll have plenty of free stuff to read. If you can't find something to entertain you in all of that, I'm not sure how to help.

Sent to you by rt r via Google Reader:

iPad for GIANT CATSGame for Cats

Start your weekend off right with playful, tech-savvy wild cats
"Game for Cats" is an iPad app with a moving image (either a laser dot or a mouse) upon which all housecats are genetically obligated to pounce, repeatedly. It's almost unbearably adorable. But what about the less domesticated felines out there--lions, tigers, caracals, servals, and the housecat-sized Geoffroy's cat? Turns out they'll play with the app as well, even if their paws are iPad-sized to begin with.

This video, which features one of those ear-piercing songs that come built-in to those 15-key Casio electric pianos that can only play one note at a time, is the result of a collaboration between the app's developer and the Conservator's Center in North Carolina. The Conservator's Center is a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving these animals as well as other non-feline animals like wolves, lemurs, binturongs, kinkajous, and deceptively cat-like genets. You can read more about the Conservator's Center here.Source: Video: Lions, Tigers, Servals, and Other Wild Felines Playing With an iPad